Home Sweet Home!

Saturday 12:30 p.m.
                              Wakening up in my own bed on a Saturday morning! Oh, yes, yes, yes!
                               The visit this week to sit with the mother in law was most successful. This is partly because I knew I'd be home on Friday afternoon. So when you're sitting at the kitchen table this is most reassuring as you try to surf  through the time.
                                I get up in to give the mother in law a pill for her osteoporosis before nine. You have to drink a glass of water and wait half an hour and neither lie down nor eat anything. Then I go upstairs, read the paper, and have a smoke. Meditate. I go back down to the kitchen when the carers have been and got the old dear up and given her breakfast.
                                After that, the mother in law sits in her seat by the fire, but she's not so good today and not feeling too great and more confused maybe, but this varies. She's falling in very heavy sleeps. I meditate until the carer comes to do lunch and then I go upstairs to smoke, read, meditate.
                                Apart from these breaks, I sit at the kitchen table and meditate there. The meditations on this Thursday are fabulous, really fabulous, but every time I hear a noise I stop and check out the mother in law. She goes to the bog about three times during the day, but every visit takes twenty miles.
                                Old age is one long trek to the toilet and one long trek back, and ..
                                When the carer shows up around half four, I get a break and go outside where I skip for fifteen minutes and then run up and down the path for fifteen minutes. Then I lie in the bath for a bit.
                                 The mother in law is not having the best day. She's concerned with her confusion and knows that things are not going as she'd like. However, around this time of the day we can have a chat. I record it. It's about horses and buggies and bringing in the turf back in Ireland in the 1920s and 30s.
                                 At one time during the day there was something different about the kind of sleep the mother in law was having and I wondered if she was passing away. I've discovered the wee strokes she was having when she fell are ongoing. Didn't realise that.
                                 When she went to bed about nine at night, I got drunk and stoned. It had been a bright autumn day, but I was only out three times; twice to the Coop across the road, (morning paper, evening drink) and the time I ran up and down the path.
                                  It really was a very good day. If I didn't meditate, I couldn't do it.